Jeddah

When I was a diapered infant, my parents left Karachi because of the political situation. It doesn’t really mean much, because Pakistani politics have chronically worsened since the country’s inception. But it’s delightfully vague and one of the few things to which pontifical, mustached Pakistani men, sitting around chai and rusk, can all solemnly bob their heads in agreement.

It just so happened that the Saudis were beginning to look for labor, and a lot of it. Cheap, manual labor, absolutely, but skilled technicians, too, the kind of people who wouldn’t have to be trained. To many, it seemed like the Saudis were throwing their oil money at anyone, a gold rush that compelled my parents to pack up their bags and two children and move to Jeddah, the second-largest city in the kingdom.

Jeddah was an hour away from Makkah, the holiest city in Islam. My parents thought that we could easily sink into the anonymity of a Muslim-majority country. They felt that Jeddah could be home.

I lived in Jeddah for twelve years. Even now, when I think of that little city by the Red Sea, I don’t think of it as home, not exactly. I could navigate the city blindfolded, but I couldn’t tell you if it ever was home to me.

In Jeddah, Mama started donning the hijab. Baba considered growing a beard because the Prophet Muhammad had been bearded. Prayer mats would sprawl languidly on the floors of our house, the top right corner curled inward. Someone who had just finished praying wouldn’t bother folding the prayer mat because they knew they’d be returning to pray again shortly.

My parents regularly took me and my brother to the Friday community prayer at our local mosque, with its latticed windows and slender, calligraphed minarets. The communal prayer was preceded by sermons in Arabic, little of which I understood. Although the imam performed the prayers with the men, his absence only deepened my reverence for him. I projected grandiose meaning onto his sermons, which boomed from the loudspeaker in the boxy womens’ prayer room. It was at Friday prayer that I felt most unselfconscious, as an eight-year-old, sitting on the prayer rug between the peeling, cracking walls of the room, enjoying the sensation of rubbing my feet back and forth against the softness of the rug. No one was perceiving me; we were all the same for those thirty minutes.

As my family exited the mosque one Friday, I glimpsed the imam, in his royal white thobe and Saudi kaffiyah. I was surprised to see him leave at the same time as my family; I had imagined he performed additional prayers after the mandatory ones that he led for the congregation. His hands cradled a Quran and a golden tasbih.

As the imam made his way out of the mosque, I watched a small brown beggar boy approach him eagerly. He said something to the imam, but the imam kept walking, ignoring the boy. I pressed my nose against the car window, the oil on my nose leaving imprints on the glass, gawking at the boy, who scampered away as the imam swung the door of his car shut. I wanted to go and talk to the boy, but what would I say? Something kept me paralyzed in my seat, too — perhaps a fear that the imam would somehow find out about my indiscretion through some supernatural, prophetic power.

After that day, I could always see the small boy as the imam barked at us through the loudspeaker. As my Arabic improved with age and experience, I began to understand the substance of his sermons: that the lot of us were bad Muslims, and that we needed to atone for our sins.

Public schools in Saudi Arabia were only open to Saudi citizens. Thankfully, Baba’s bank paid for my tuition at a private British international school, a ten-minute walk from my house. Like most private international schools, the student body at mine was small, around sixty students, and included very wealthy natives, many of whom were princes from the ever-proliferating Saudi royal family.

Of the Arabs, we had a smattering of Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Palestinians. There was another, smaller, group that comprised a mixture of expats, from Japan, from South Africa, from Malaysia, many from the Indian subcontinent. We were all in the same classes and extracurriculars. But the Saudis only ever invited other Arabs to their extravagant birthday parties. Likewise, expats spent time with each other exclusively, at the mall and during our lunch breaks at school. There was some mixing, but it was only a select few that transcended these borders.

We were also separated in our residences. My family lived in a “compound” — a small, gated community with rented houses designed to hold expats. Expats were relegated to compounds because we weren’t permitted to purchase property. Our existences in Saudi Arabia were supposed to be transient and nomadic. We had no path to Saudi naturalization.

Compounds were a respite from the cultural hegemony of Saudi wahhabism. I loved my compound with its identical, blank-canvas villas that connected such that every private fight could be heard by the surrounding units. The compound had everything I could ever think to want as a girl: a swimming pool, a supermarket, a tennis and basketball court, a recreation room with foosball and an air hockey table. I spent my time divided between school and the compound — I don’t remember being anywhere else. It was culturally insulated from the rest of Saudi society; women could sunbathe by the pool in bikinis and alcohol could be consumed without penalty from the mutaw’aa, the religious police that prowled the kingdom and the perimeters of our compounds. It was clear to me that the mutawa’aa were policing expat behavior because I only ever saw the mutawa’aa interact with foreigners, with their broken Arabic, in malls and other public spaces. Saudis weren’t permitted to enter compounds for reasons that were easy for me, then, to conjecture: so that the Saudis might be protected from the vices of us, the morally depraved expats, corrupting Saudi wahhabism with our heretical ideas. It is only now, after all these years, that I wonder if the compounds were designed to keep us safe from them — people like the mutawa’aa and my imam.

The school imported most of our teachers from the UK. The students would joke that the only qualifying factor to become a teacher was to flaunt a British accent; the teachers’ accents lent an authority to their words, even if some of them lacked the experience to back it up. In class, I would often muse about why these white people would forsake their free lives in the West for restricted ones in the Middle East. We had no bars, no cinemas — just endless, soulless malls, in which the stores would close during each of the five prayers, interrupting shoppers.

Our teachers made us watch cartoons on the BBC, read storybooks by Enid Blyton, and study the Tudors. We weren’t ever really sure why, but now I think it was because it was what they knew our parents wanted us to consume: the savory parts of English culture. Our teachers, for instance, never taught us about the role the British played in the history of our countries. We celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, too, the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne. Red and white and blue balloons soared into the sky that day, characteristically cloudless on our school’s cricket pitch. I remember a sea of brown faces of varying shades, dark heads, unkempt school uniforms. I remember my warbling voice, louder than that of my peers, proud to remember the verses of the anthem beyond God Save Our Gracious Queen!; I remember feeling a stirring in my heart, maybe for the first time, toward a country that I still didn’t know had colonized my people. Although the school had a total of one white-faced British student represented in its student body, all of us — the Saudis, the Arabs, the expats — cosplayed British school children. When our school received a letter from Buckingham Palace, effusively thanking us for our celebrations, I felt like Queen Elizabeth II was thanking me personally.

My academic rival in school was a boy called Paresh Uppal. His father was a banker, like mine, and he lived in a neighboring compound. He was Indian and Hindu. He smelled like delicious Indian food and oiled his hair regularly. I called him PU, like P-U, that’s gross! I knew it was unkind. But I was just insecure that I, too, smelled like Mama’s Pakistani food, despite my fastidious attempts to mask its stench with my Victoria’s Secret Pure Seduction body mist.

Paresh and I were sort of friends. We had inherited our parents’ suspicion for the others’ country and kept each other at arm’s length. Ironically, I held no such suspicion for my British teachers. Still, we were bereft of friendship options and found solidarity in each other’s loneliness. We would spend our lunch breaks lolling on benches, legs swinging. Around noon, the sun would cut long shadows over our hunched figures. We would quiz each other on Arabic verb conjugations, eager to one-up the other.

On their way to the football field, our classmates would snicker at us. I was okay with the teasing about my nerdiness, but I hated the speculations about my relationship with Paresh. He wasn’t Muslim, so it wasn’t even a real option. I hated that people felt like it was plausible, that I might like someone like him. The implication that we shared a social station in our school rankled me, too, because Paresh was bullied a lot. Sometimes, during our breaks, some of the Saudi boys would tug him away from his books and force him to recite the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith said at the time of conversion. When he was returned to our table, his brown scrawny arms mottled with white scratches, I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t acquiesced, that the Saudis, for maybe the first time, hadn’t gotten what they’d wanted.

I knew that I was supposed to respect Paresh’s commitment to his values or whatever, but all I remember feeling was resentment. Just say the shahada, I would think as we walked silently to class. I felt like Paresh wasn’t teaching the Saudi boys a lesson; he was trying to prove that he was better than them. And we both knew that he wasn’t, at least not in Saudi Arabia.

In Year Seven, at 12 years old, Nadia Mansour began sitting next to me in maths. Maths was organized into “sets,” an academic hierarchy from which I derived much validation. Set 1 Maths was for the cleverest students, so I was surprised to see that Nadia had made the cut; she would often peer over my shoulder for the answers to our sums. I knew that her decision to sit next to me was because I was especially good at maths. Still, I saw her proximity as an opening — an exciting possibility that she wanted to befriend me.

She was the daughter of a Saudi business mogul. I knew she was wealthy because she owned a Kipling backpack and would buy food from the school cafeteria every day, a privilege that I was only granted on a fortnightly basis. All the wealthy people I knew were beautiful, and Nadia was no exception. The sun seemed to give her bronzy face a luminous, Princess Jasmine-esque glow while only spotlighting the constellations of pink acne on mine.

I resented how perfect she was, but I had hoped that by becoming her friend, some of her perfection might rub off on me. I imbued her presence next to me in math with all sorts of meaning. Like: maybe she secretly wanted to be friends but couldn’t because of her Saudi friends, who weren’t willing to commit a social transgression. I’d watched this storyline play out in a Disney Channel original movie and was more than happy to assume the role of the nerd, transformed by her friendship with the popular girl.

One day, Nadia invited me to her house to work on a school project, for which we were assigned to each other as partners. It was because she technically wasn’t allowed to enter my compound, but I was nevertheless thrilled. If we finished early, I wondered if she would invite me to swim in her pool or into her movie theater. Public movie theaters were forbidden in Saudi Arabia.

I normally took a minivan back to my compound from school, in which expat students were expected to pile in and crowd, some being forced to stand. After school that day, however, I followed Nadia into her SUV, as big as the minivan, with tinted glass windows. I spotted Paresh and reveled in the look he shot me, a bewildered — and envious, I was sure — witness to my social elevation. The optics of me climbing into Nadia’s car would be impossible to deny by its spectators. Nadia and I — we were friends.

Asalaam-Alaikum, the driver greeted us. I sat in the passenger seat diagonal to him and glimpsed his chappals — the slippers that Baba wore only in the bathroom — and his fraying white shalwaar kameez, billowing in the car’s air conditioning. His beard was streaked golden with henna. But it was the way he greeted us, the way he sounded his vowels, that incriminated him. He wasn’t Saudi or Arab. He was Pakistani.

Where are you from? The driver asked in Urdu, as he reversed the car from the parking space. He was looking in the rear-view mirror, his eyes on mine. My skin prickled under his appraisal. Nadia looked curiously between us. Maybe it was the first time she’d ever heard her driver say more than a word or two. For a second, I considered feigning incomprehension.

Lahore, I mumbled, averting my gaze. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, he abandoned further attempts at conversation. I hated that the driver had called attention to my commonality with him, that he had sabotaged my chances at camouflaging myself in the landscape of Nadia’s world. That when Nadia looked at me now, she would never be able to see a best friend, only her chauffeur.

Thankfully, though, Nadia kept me by her side. She became my principal benefactor, sponsoring my now-daily cafeteria meals and excursions to the mall. I had hoped that she’d forgotten about my exchange with the driver, or that maybe she had just forgiven my transgression. The latter brought me little comfort; I knew it would still count as a strike against me. For what, I was still unclear, but I felt I needed to make up for something. I would hear about her family’s skiing vacations, about her father’s new hotels, about all sorts of Saudi high-society gossip. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but I’d always nod eagerly on cue.

Nadia had a boyfriend, and they would make out and do other inappropriate stuff. It was a little shocking to me because up until then, I thought Muslims didn’t kiss or have sex before marriage, especially not the kind of Muslims that Saudis were supposed to be: devout, conservative, pious. Islam was birthed in their country; Saudis had a special claim over the religion. Still, after the incident with the imam, I had begun to question that claim — a subversion that had surprised me.

Nadia relished in sharing details about their physical relationship to me. I knew I should have been flattered by the trust she placed in me, but I knew what her confidence really meant: she still didn’t consider me one of her own. She knew that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and that even if I did, no one would believe me — a lesser Muslim — over her. She’d often ask, you don’t judge me for this, do you? I would shake my head, but I think she always knew that I was lying. This, I knew, was part of being her friend.

Sometimes, I would spot Paresh sitting on the benches, alone.  Even when I felt most despondent about my progress with Nadia, I couldn’t bring myself to feel ashamed about ditching him for her; I was convinced that he would have done the same if he’d had the opportunity.

Once, Paresh intercepted me on the way to class from lunch break. He smelled good, like Axe deodorant. His hair wasn’t greased up anymore; it was dry and flattened against his forehead. Nadia gave me a slight nod, like she was granting me permission to converse with Paresh, before entering the school building. Paresh looked at me, but I couldn’t read his expression. He asked me about my grade on the last math exam. I sensed that he was trying to reestablish our rapport. I knew that this was his way of asking, can we go back to sitting together at lunch?

I stared at the familiar scars that ran down his arms. Don’t remember, I shrugged, and I left him behind.

My family was sitting at the dinner table. The adhan, a melody of Arabic words, was reverberating through our compound premises, but when I looked out the window to observe its source, all I could see was a swimming pool with two bikini-clad women sunbathing.

Baba waited for the imam to finish the call to prayer. Then, he announced, back erect, hands clasped: We’re moving to Indiana. In America. Insha’Allah. You will study in the top schools there.

I felt the spices of Mama’s chicken biryani well up against the walls of my throat. I reached for my mug of milk, hiding my face, to buy a few seconds to consider my response. Nadia’s friends were just beginning to accept my unwavering presence in their world. Things felt incomplete; I was at the precipice of finally belonging in Jeddah. I could almost taste it, the sort of entitlement that I conjectured Saudis must have felt toward the Kingdom.

I found it funny that we were moving to a city — state? What was the difference? — with India in its name. I felt the urge to tell Paresh, to consult him about this new development, but I hadn’t spoken to him in so long that I didn’t know if I could.

My brother asked, when?

Summer.

My brother and I looked at each other mutely. I knew nothing about America, but we had heard recently of the joke candidate Trump running for President and his disdain for Muslims. He didn’t seem like good news, but at the time no one believed that he would actually win.

My brother didn’t look particularly shocked, and I was surprised to realize that neither was I. I guess we’d always known that our stay in Saudi Arabia would come to an end; I could never quite conceptualize Baba, shrunken in height and stature, or Mama, with grayed hair, living in Jeddah. Maybe a return to Pakistan seemed in order; even the United Kingdom, with our cultural proximity to the British at school, made more sense to me. But America had always been completely beyond the realm of possibility. There was an implied permanence to our move there.

I didn’t know what life looked like beyond the coast of the Red Sea, but I felt a deep sense of foreboding. In Saudi Arabia, I was one among many coffee-colored people — year-round, barring seasonality — and, even if the Saudis weren’t my people, I could still pretend like they were. I was good at shapeshifting; I had years of practice. But that wouldn’t be possible in America, not when culture and religion and race would separate me from the status quo. The odds felt overwhelmingly stacked against me.

And yet a small part of me felt an unexpected thrill at the opportunity to start over, for the first time ever. Maybe in Indiana, I would be a Nadia Mansour. Maybe I would stand out in the ways Nadia Mansour did, in all her exotic Princess Jasmine glory. I fantasized about reinventing and workshopping myself, adopting a new accent and personality, starting from scratch. It was ridiculous to even consider, I chided myself reprovingly, but the idea was too delicious for me to refrain from indulging.

The day after Baba told us the news, Jeddah experienced its annual flash floods, prompting a week-long break from school. There was always talk of building a drainage system, but it always diminished as quickly as the water vaporized from the streets of Jeddah. These breaks always felt like a period of renewal for me, like a fresh haircut, like I could remake a part of myself and no one would feel the difference except in the subtle, but perhaps more significant, ways.

I’d spent the better part of the recess rehearsing how I’d break the news to everyone, how I’d talk about my new life in Indiana, how dramatic of a performance I would deliver. I’d never really had news to break before, and I feared ambivalence, like no one would really feel my absence, like my twelve years didn’t mean anything after all.

At the end of our daily lunch break, students would crowd around the water cooler before class. I felt that this would be the opportune time to break the news: I would make the announcement, and then we’d promptly enter the building for class. I wouldn’t really have time to answer questions, so the intrigue of my big news would be preserved.

Guys — I’m like — I guess I’m moving to America.

I quickly glanced at Nadia. I hadn’t told her beforehand. Her eyes were big, even bigger than they normally were, and they looked a little watery. Her perfectly chiseled eyebrows were furrowed, but whether she was upset that I was leaving (here my heart leaped at the thought) or unhappy that I hadn’t informed her first, I couldn’t tell.

Nadia recomposed her features quickly — too quickly. With dismay, I wondered if it was because she realized that she could easily find another brown, moony-faced expat to ride in her SUV and marvel at her life. I’d always felt like I’d fooled Nadia into believing I was a one-of-a-kind friend. But even now, looking at the crowd of my classmates encircling me now, I could identify other contenders for Nadia’s best friend. I wouldn’t be hard to replace.

Trumpland! someone said, interrupting my thoughts, and we all erupted into laughter. It felt comforting, that we were laughing alongside each other, that we were all in on the joke. In the face of Trump, an imaginary, comically Islamophobic villain, it felt like we could be united. I delighted in the feeling of “us” versus them. I’d never felt it before: a kinship with the Saudis and Arabs around me. It felt unfair that this seemed possible only in light of my imminent departure: this ephemeral, bittersweet taste of belonging.

I tried to catch Paresh’s eye; I wanted to see that he cared, though I knew I didn’t deserve it. He looked startled, and then momentarily disturbed, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my end. He broke away from the group and walked into the building, leaving me behind. The group seemed to follow his cue, losing interest in my announcement. My few moments of fame were gone, and I was left alone, thinking about them — the them that I would soon be joining in America.

Later, I remember sitting in that Saudi Airlines aircraft, looking out at the landscape of Jeddah, its barrenness, the skinny palm trees, swaying in the coastal breeze. I listened to sad music to help elicit an emotional response that felt fitting for this farewell. I thought of my correctly accented British teachers, of Nadia and Paresh, of that one white kid in our school, of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I would feel a stirring, but my heart was closed, like it was the day I saw the imam with that poor brown boy, and it stayed closed throughout that twelve hour flight.